Better Sounding Podcasts: Levelator, GarageBand, and SoundSoap

If you've ever listened to Yackademac, you may notice I don't follow my own advice. But, hey, it's taken me 15 episodes to figure this little amount out. I don't have time to actually use it for heaven's sakes.

Paul Colligan, on his blog, provides a four-step how-to on using GarageBand and The Levelator to improve the audio quality of your podcast. In short, he says to export your podcast vocal track to iTunes (in .aiff file form) to get it into a file format that the Levelator can read. You'll have to delete the podcast track (the top track in GarageBand if you've clicked on the "Create New Podcast Episode" when you launched GarageBand and opened a project) prior to clicking Share -> Send Podcast to Itunes.

Don't worry, just save the project before you do this if you've already added art to make it an enhanced podcast and then close it without saving to get your track back once you've exported. Hope that makes sense. (If not re-read slowly, and in a different voice. You never know, it may help.) The easiest workflow would just be to add all that interactive content after you've got the audio vocal track sorted out. All you have to do to turn a regular audio project in GarageBand into a podcast is to click Track -> Show Podcast Track.

Moving in confusingly reverse chronological order - just to keep you on your toes - the Levelator "Read Me" (which I broke tradition and did) says "Do any noise reduction and equalization before using The Levelator. The better the input to The Levelator, the better the output." One great plug-in for reducing background noise is SoundSoap 2 by Bias. To access this application using GarageBand, once you've followed the instructions and installed it, just select the track you want to clean up, click the "i" in the bottom right ("View/ Hide the Track Info."), click the "Detail" arrow, and use the pop-up to select SoundSoap. Twist the the dials and click the buttons until you're happy with the sound.

As a final piece of free advice to educators, and worth every penny, just stick to the built-in mic of your Mac and the pre-configure Effects in the Track Info window that GarageBand provides. "Male Narrator Noisy" is a particularly good setting for male podcasters. Simple and effective.

I should have mentioned this at the start, but I wanted to keep you reading. Enjoy!